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Less is more: Online consumer ratings' format affects purchase intentions and processing
Author(s) -
Kostyk Alena,
Niculescu Mihai,
Leonhardt James M.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of consumer behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.811
H-Index - 43
eISSN - 1479-1838
pISSN - 1472-0817
DOI - 10.1002/cb.1643
Subject(s) - feeling , affect (linguistics) , processing fluency , presentation (obstetrics) , consumer behaviour , psychology , fluency , information processing , marketing , advertising , empirical research , social psychology , business , cognitive psychology , medicine , mathematics education , communication , radiology , philosophy , epistemology
Online customer ratings of products and services are commonplace in e‐commerce; however, the format in which these ratings are presented to consumers can vary. Although not anticipated by classical models of decision making, latter models such as prospect theory and feelings‐as‐information theory suggest that the presentation format of online customer ratings could affect subsequent consumer decision making. In the present research, 3 empirical studies test whether online customer ratings' formats differentially affect consumer purchase intentions. The results offer support for feeling‐as‐information theory and suggest that online ratings presented in a mean (vs. distribution) format result in higher purchase intentions as a result of increased processing fluency. Implications for the presentation of online consumer ratings in e‐commerce, based on these findings, are addressed.